What is Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?

Posted by Vita Architecture Ltd on 1st November 2019 -

What is Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?

As our in house CPD coordinator, Beatrice Scorta shares her views on how and why she’s building our CPD schedule to keep us in touch with the latest the industry has to offer.

CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development. It is the process of learning, tracking and documenting the skills, knowledge and experience that you gain as you work.

As with most professions, doing Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is mandatory for our Chartered Members. Doing CPD helps us to stay competent, professional, capable and resilient as an architect. CPD also helps us to face current and future challenges as well as learn new skills and specialisms.”

That’s right! CPDs are now one of the essential requirements in our professional’s careers as qualified architects. It’s designed to keep architects and construction professionals up-to-date with the right skills and core competence. At Vita, our aim is to use CPD in a structured manner to not only cover the core curriculum that we need to cover but to use it as a tool to explore the newest products and technologies out there so that each and every one of our projects can potentially benefit from those groundbreaking products that are on the market.

So how is it structured?

CPD can be mainly split into ‘structured’ or ‘informal’.

• Structured’ are traditional set courses, presented by a representative of the supplier company who provides a better understanding of a specific topic or technology. (up to 2 hours).
• ‘Informal’ CPD can, instead, be self-directed as reading, shorts videos, podcasts, etc.

What do we have to do as architects?

In order to comply with the RIBA standards, we need to undertake at least 35 hours of learning ( half must be ‘structured’ ) and 20 of them must come from the ten mandatory RIBA Core Curriculum CPD topics.

https://www.architecture.com/education-cpd-and-careers/cpd/cpd-core-curriculum

• Architecture for social purpose
• Health, safety and wellbeing
• Business, clients and services
• Legal, regulatory and statutory compliance
• Procurement and contracts
• Sustainable architecture
• Inclusive environments
• Places, planning and communities
• Building conservation and heritage
• Design, construction and technology

Beyond the legislative and regulatory reasons behind the CPD learning, smart technologies within the industry lead the way we should be considering design from the outset of any project and that’s what it’s it so important for us to not only keep up to date with innovation within the industry but to use CPDs as a tool to research and apply the knowledge and materials to the projects we have available to us.

Nowadays, it is vital for all the qualified and future architects to stay relevant and up to date on new industry trends. CPDs are great in this sense and help us ensure that our multifaceted craft is considered from a wider perspective.

The hope I hold for our CPD structure is to gain knowledge about traditional topics to which I am still learning about as Part 1 architectural assistant, but it’s also to use the system to discover and research the wider market that’s out there and available to us as architects.

CPD in action!

One of our recent CPDs involved the lovely Graeme Bell from Aurubis coming in to talk to us about the specification of architectural copper. Since then, we’ve had various discussions over the finishing type, application method and most importantly it’s potential specification and installation of one of our projects! Here’s the result below, predominantly brick but our ground floor units are topped with a copper finish!